The Crisis of EU Enlargement

Enlargement is widely hailed as the EU’s most successful foreign policy tool. Over the past four decades, the European Community (which became the European Union in 1993) managed to transform itself from a club of six Western European democracies to the world’s largest economy, encompassing 28 countries and half a billion people. The recent financial crisis, however, has given rise to doubts about the viability and the attractiveness of the EU model. In this context of soft power crisis, the EU has a policy problem, that, according to Günter Verheugen, ‘the enlargement process now lacks any strategic orientation’. Enlargement faces daunting challenges both internally and with respect to its neighbours. If the EU hopes to revive its most successful foreign policy tool, it must reconsider why it has been successful in the past and integrate these lessons to develop a new strategy.

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